It sounds like an unusual friendship: residents of a remote Australian outback town and members of the Croatian government. But that is exactly what formed when filmmaker Peter Pecotić retraced his father’s footsteps from Australia’s urban east coast to the Top End in a quest to find other descendants of the small Croatian island where his family originated. 

On his 10,000km journey, he met aboriginal artist Joseph Williams, who believed his father was also a European migrant, and the pair formed a joint effort to discover their ancestry. The result was Countryman, a documentary about finding family roots, identity, belonging and our relationship to ancestral lands.  

Countryman has already screened at several Croatian film festivals and First Nations community centres around Australia, bringing the film to over 1,000 indigenous and Australia-Croatian people and demonstrating the power of documentary to unite people and families across a spectrum of backgrounds and experience. 

The filmmakers also brought the film back to where the story began in Tennant Creek, a largely indigenous town of 3,000 people 1,000km inland from Darwin, where Croatian government representatives met with Warumungu Elders as well as the Local Government. 

The film has connected families, communities, countries and audiences to Country.